A.D. 1800 - 1900
(12 displayed of 206 in collection)
The Thomas Hunt and the America (1852; James Bard) This large scale portrait of two famous vessels by the leading New York based painter of steamboats and sailing vessels on the New York City waterways, James Bard, represents his finest known work. In addition to its importance as a major maritime painting that captures the age of sail and steam, it is considered an icon of American folk art.
At the Seaside (ca. 1892; William Merritt Chase) From 1891 to 1902, Chase served as the director of the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art in the town of Southampton, on Long Island, New York. Chase taught two days each week and spent the rest of his time painting and enjoying the company of his family. In this canvas, women and children take their ease on a beach, probably along Shinnecock Bay. A perfect site for genteel leisure on a perfect day, Chase’s rendering is capped by a broad expanse of sky that fills the upper half of the canvas. The scudding clouds artfully echo the bright white forms of the children’s dresses and the parasol.
Lake George and the Village of Caldwell (ca 1850s; Thomas Chambers) Based on a print of the same title by Jacques Milberg, this painting and seven other known versions represent one of Chambers’s most popular landscape subjects, set in upstate New York on the shores of Lake George. In this example, with its flushed sunset and idyllic waterway dotted with sailboats, the artist encapsulated the rapid transformation of the wilderness into settled land during this period. The village looms large as a flourishing haven of tourism, and the church’s spire stretches toward the horizon. Departing from Milberg’s print, Chambers simplified the foreground, by means of his distinctive shorthand style and vibrant palette.
The Gulf Stream (1899; Winslow Homer) Homer was preoccupied with the power of the ocean, and often made it the subject of his art, whether at home on the coast of Maine or while traveling. The Gulf Stream is named after the strong Atlantic current that connected many of the locales where he liked to paint. Homer based this dramatic scene of imminent disaster on sketches and watercolors he had made during winter trips to the Bahamas in 1884 and 1898, after crossing the Gulf Stream several times. A man faces his demise on a dismasted, rudderless fishing boat, sustained by only a few stalks of sugarcane, while threatened by sharks and a distant waterspout. He is oblivious to the schooner on the left horizon, which Homer later added to the composition as a sign of hopeful rescue. Painted shortly after the death of his father, in 1898, the painting has been interpreted as an expression of the artist’s presumed sense of mortality and vulnerability. The Gulf Stream also references some of the complex social and political issues of the era—war, the legacy of slavery, and American imperialism—as well as more universal concerns with the fragility of human life and the dominance of nature.
Eaton's Neck, Long Island (1872; John Frederick Kensett) Kensett painted Eaton’s Neck, Long Island in the last summer of his life, which he spent mainly on Contentment Island, near Darien, Connecticut. Eaton’s Neck, New York, was a short ferry ride across Long Island Sound. The rigorously simplified work is divided into three zones: sea, land, and sky. No extraneous elements complicate the astonishingly unconventional composition—a work notably ahead of its time.
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845; George Caleb Bingham) In the summer of 1845, Bingham returned to his St. Louis home from a winter stay in central Missouri, bringing with him several paintings and sketches. This was one of those works that he later sent to New York’s American Art-Union, a subscription-based organization that promoted American art nationally through exhibitions and the distribution of popular prints. Titled by the artist "French Trader & Half breed Son", the Art-Union changed it to the more generic and less controversial "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri". Bingham, who began his career as a portraitist, produced this distinctive genre painting with little precedent in his oeuvre. The tranquil scene, with its luminous atmosphere, idealized the American frontier for the benefit of an Eastern audience.
Cider Making (1840-41; William Sidney Mount) Though this scene convincingly captures a moment in rural life, its inspiration lay in the political maneuvering surrounding the hard-fought presidential election of 1840. The image of down-home simplicity embodied by the cider makers was evoked by the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, promoted as a common man who preferred a log cabin and hard cider to the supposed excesses of the Democratic White House of Martin Van Buren. The work was commissioned by the prominent New York businessman and Whig leader Charles Augustus Davis. Davis was the creator of the folksy "Jack Downing" character, whose musings broadened Whig appeal through attacks on the disastrous Jacksonian financial policies responsible for the Panic of 1837. Mount, a conservative Democrat who opposed the populist Jackson, punctuated his painting with details, such as the prominently dated cider barrel, possibly intended to allude to the larger political context. In 1841, a Whig journalist wove the references into an anecdote in the "New York American" ripe with political insinuations and double meanings. Probably with greater specificity than the artist intended, he likened each figure to a character or interest group in the election. It is likely that Mount's motives included both subtle political concerns and a commitment to the transcription of visual data gleaned directly from his rural surroundings. The cider mill immortalized here stood in Setauket, Long Island, until the early twentieth century.
Arques-la-Bataille (1885; John Henry Twachtman) Studying as an artist in Munich in the mid-1870s, Twachtman had painted with a dark palette and lively brushwork, both of which he abandoned when he moved to Paris to enroll at the Académie Julian in 1883. This painting is one of several large landscapes he created during his two years in France. Based on a preliminary oil study also in the Museum's collection (1991.130), it depicts a scene at Arques-la-Bataille, a town four miles southeast of Dieppe, in Normandy, where the Béthune and two other streams flow together to form the Arques River. Its emphasis on formal design recalls both Japanese woodblock prints and James McNeill Whistler’s nocturnes.
The Englishman (William Tom Warrener, 1861–1934) at the Moulin Rouge (1892; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) William Tom Warrener, an English painter and friend of Lautrec’s, appears as a top-hatted gentleman chatting up two female companions at the Moulin Rouge, the dance hall that epitomized the colorful and tawdry nightlife of fin-de-siècle Paris. The women’s suggestive attitudes—and Warrener’s ear, reddened in embarrassment—indicate the risqué nature of their conversation. This painting served as a preparatory study for a color lithograph of 1892.
Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) (1891; Paul Gauguin) Before embarking on a series of pictures inspired by Polynesian religious beliefs, Gauguin devoted this, his first major Tahitian canvas, to a Christian theme, describing it in a letter of March 1892: "An angel with yellow wings reveals Mary and Jesus, both Tahitians, to two Tahitian women, nudes dressed in pareus, a sort of cotton cloth printed with flowers that can be draped from the waist. Very somber, mountainous background and flowering trees . . . a dark violet path and an emerald green foreground, with bananas on the left. I'm rather happy with it." Gauguin based much of the composition on a photograph he owned of a bas-relief in the Javanese temple of Borobudur.
An Arctic Summer- Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay (1871; William Bradford) In 1861 the marine painter William Bradford made the first of his eight expeditions to the Arctic. This painting, based on photographs and sketches produced during his final trip, in 1869, shows the artist’s steamer, Panther, plying its way through the summer ice along the northern coast of Greenland. Panther was one of numerous vessels engaged in the search for the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. According to Bradford’s journal, the ship’s crew had decided to hunt the polar bear seen in the foreground, “anxious to possess so fine a skin,” but the bear made a parting glance over its shoulder before heading for the water, managing to escape its pursuers.
Haystacks- Autumn (ca. 1874; Jean-Francois Millet) This picture is from a series depicting the four seasons commissioned in 1868 by the industrialist Frédéric Hartmann. Millet worked on the paintings intermittently for the next seven years. In Autumn, with the harvest finished, the gleaners have departed and the sheep are left to graze. Beyond the haystacks lie the plain of Chailly and the rooftops of Barbizon. The loose, sketchlike finish of this work is characteristic of Millet's late style: patches of the dark lilac-pink ground color are deliberately exposed, and the underdrawing is visible, particularly in the outlines of the haystacks and the sheep.